Dick Holbrooke and I were once at a meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations — the New York-based policy institution of which both of us were elected life members — and I asked him if he expected to become U.S. Secretary of State under President Hillary Rodham Clinton. The American presidential campaign was under way at the time, and Mrs. Clinton was battling a relatively unknown senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, for the Democratic nomination.
“I'm not going to discuss my personal politics,” Mr. Holbrooke said to me in a tone that I thought did not take into consideration the many years we'd known each other.
But after the meeting, he took me aside, and smiled broadly.
“Come on, Pranay,” he said, “you know the answer to that one, right?”
Richard C. Holbrooke was like that. He could be abrupt and abrasive one moment, and then he could turn on the charm. But he was a loyal friend, not a characteristic of many public officials for whom loyalty is a commodity to be traded during election time or when seeking appointments to high office.
Sought-after adviser
Dick Holbrooke never was that kind of trader. He did not have to be. He was a fiendishly hard-working man whose towering intellect and acuity, and stellar track record, made him a sought-after adviser by chieftains in the public and private sectors.
You could never tell with Dick Holbrooke. Was that smile actually a smirk, or the other way around? Was that frown a sign of gravitas or a signal of boredom? Was that nod an indication of approval or just a hint that he'd heard what you'd said? Was that shrug of the shoulders a suggestion of a turndown, or was it simply a way to telegraph indifference?It was precisely the uncertainty that Richard C. Holbrooke engendered in others about his thoughts and temperament that made him such an extraordinary diplomat, negotiator and adviser to successive Democratic presidents of the United States over the last four decades. Mr. Holbrooke, who died Monday evening (December 13) in Washington of complications from surgery to repair a ruptured aorta, was arguably one of the most successful American envoys since World War II. He was the prime architect of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the conflict in Bosnia which, along with Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia, had seceded from the erstwhile Yugoslavia. The secession spawned horrific ethnic cleansing of Muslims that left humanitarian, social and political scars.
Mr. Holbrooke did not try to heal those deep scars: he always said that as a negotiator, his prime job was to end the fighting to the political satisfaction of all. He should have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for shepherding the Dayton agreement, but in one of those mysterious acts in which the Norwegian Parliament sometimes indulges, the ambassador was passed over.
That must have hurt, for Dick Holbrooke was an immensely ambitious man. The signs of his ego were in full frontal view during his undergraduate days at Brown University where, after his graduation, he brashly offered his services to the New York Times . The Times , not a newspaper to turn down applicants from Ivy League colleges for junior-level posts, did not stick to form. The young man was rejected, whereupon he joined the U.S. Foreign Service.
Notwithstanding the rejection by TheTimes, the media always fascinated Mr. Holbrooke. In later years, he edited a prestigious magazine, Foreign Policy , and was a frequent contributor to the opinion pages of other publications, including the newspaper that had spurned him after college. And as his career in diplomacy blossomed, the media began fawning over him in ways that endlessly pleased Mr. Holbrooke but would have been embarrassing to some in public life.
It was an irony that his third wife, Katie Marton, was herself an author and journalist; her earlier husband had been a superstar of American television, the ABC News anchor Peter Jennings. One wondered what was going on in both men's minds when Mr. Jennings, who died a few years ago, occasionally interviewed Mr. Holbrooke on air. Was that jutted jaw and tight smile a macho effort to keep his personal animus toward Mr. Jennings? Or was it just another of the Janus-like faces that Mr. Holbrooke had cultivated over his long decades in public life?
Mr. Holbrooke, to be sure, would never let on.
Reaching out
I said earlier in this essay that Mr. Holbrooke did not see himself as a healer when on duty as a diplomat. That wasn't entirely the case: in his most recent job as U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, he privately bled at the atrocities in those countries. He also led a non-profit organisation, the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GBC).
As chairman of the Asia Society, he emphasised the need to reach out to minority communities, and to civilisations such as Islam which, he felt, offered enduring lessons in tolerance and cultural understanding. He privately expressed alarm over attacks on Muslims in India, a country whose culture and customs both he and Katie Marton loved deeply.
I also said earlier in this essay that not winning the Nobel Peace Prize must have hurt Mr. Holbrooke. Another huge hurt was surely that he never got to be U.S. Secretary of State, a post that he had coveted. There was expectation when Hillary Clinton's husband, Bill, was elected President in 1992 that he would name Mr. Holbrooke to the post; Mr. Clinton instead chose Madeleine Albright, also a child of European refugees like Mr. Holbrooke.
After Mr. Obama defeated Mrs. Clinton in the Democratic primaries to win the nomination, Mr. Holbrooke faithfully advised him on foreign policy issues. There was serious expectation that when Mr. Obama won the presidency by prevailing against Republican Senator John McCain, Mr. Holbrooke would become America's chief diplomat. The job went instead to his close friend, Mrs. Clinton.
It was in Hillary Clinton's office at the State Department that Mr. Holbrooke collapsed last Friday. He underwent 21 hours of surgery. In the end he died of a ruptured aorta on Monday evening. But I think that Dick Holbrooke's heart had been broken long before that. It's just that he never let on.
( Pranay Gupte's next book, on India and the Middle East, will be published by Penguin/Viking in early 2011. He is currently working on his memoirs of more than four decades in international journalism, from which this essay is adapted .)
